This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube Q&A titled "Sara Mauskopf Q&A On How Winnie Acquired Their First Customers" (created 2024-05-01) featuring Sara Mauskopf interviewed by an unnamed host. The discussion covers Winnie's early days and pivot from a free app without product–market fit to a daycare/preschool marketplace, tactics used to acquire initial users (App Store promotion, posting in parent groups, Facebook ads), how the first paying customer (KinderCare) emerged from traffic the platform drove, and lessons about distinguishing vanity growth from meaningful, monetizable usage.
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Thanks so much for joining us and sharing everything. I was curious if you can share more about like the early days. You talked about like the pivot and kind of like a more kind of practical question is like when you were like in those groups and trying to find your first, like, let's say 10 customers, how do you like make it sound like less promotional but build more trust with them? But just wondering, like, how did you kind of get your first like 10? customers?
Yeah, so like in the early days when we had this app that didn't have product market fit, um, we tried like everything under the sun to get people to use it. They weren't even customers because they weren't paying. Like, we were just like, please download this free thing. And by the way, back in that time there was no website, it was just an app. Um, we did everything from like posting in mothers groups to asking our friends to Apple promoted us in the App Store because we like had cool artwork that they liked and we kind of found an inroads into like an Apple rep who wanted to promote our app. So that got us lots of users. We didn't have product market fit, so it didn't matter how much we did that. Like eventually they would churn out and we weren't making any money from them. On the other hand, like when we pivoted to this daycare and preschool marketplace, In the beginning, we didn't monetize at all. We just kind of built this utility. And then over time, the daycares and preschools started coming to us. They said, you're sending us all this traffic. These were the bigger ones that were more sophisticated and could see the kind of UTM source parameter. And they also saw that we were taking impression share from them in search results. So it was actually KinderCare was our very first customer. They're Massive daycare chain, the biggest, and they saw all the traffic we were sending them and they said, you know, we should probably work out some kind of deal because we don't want this to go away. And that was when we kind of realized like we could probably now take this to a few others and we did. But I think like the key for me was like it didn't, You know, getting all those users only mattered when we could, you know, we actually had something that people were using and we had a business model. And so I kind of wish we didn't have that promotion from Apple and we didn't have like people that agreed to download it for free because it kind of gave us this false sense of like, oh yeah, people are using it and they're downloading it, but they And we also ran ads in the early days. Like, we blew a lot of money on ads. Um, back then, like, Facebook ads were pretty cheap. Um, so we could get downloads pretty cheaply. I think they— that's changed a bit with some of the targeting stuff that's changed. But yeah, we did a lot of things that kind of showed growth, but it wasn't really useful growth.
